Agents of Social Change

Echoing Green is a neat organization that "invests in and supports outstanding emerging social entrepreneurs to launch new organizations that deliver bold, high-impact solutions." They offer a two-year fellowship program to help a group of "visionaries develop new solutions to society's most difficult problems."

This year's slate of finalists promise some great problem-solving and good to be done. A few that caught my eye:

The Op-Ed Project: Targeting, training and channeling women experts to the op-ed pages of top newspapers, online sites, and other key forums of public debate to project new diverse voices into national conversation.

GreenMango: Bringing the power of online marketing technologies to poor business owners in developing countries to enable them to grow their businesses and increase their income.

Hot Bread Kitchen: Creating well-paid careers for immigrant women while preserving baking traditions, harnessing lost human capital, and building esteem for immigrant communities.

Sustainable Health Enterprises: Unleashing girls' and women's economic potential by starting up female-run franchises that manufacture and distribute low priced, high-quality, and environmentally friendly sanitary towels for domestic and international markets.

Green Coast Enterprises: Building environmentally sound structures that can withstand the rigors of hurricanes, termites, heat, and humidity at a price that is within the reach of average people.

Check out the entire list (about 30 projects) here.

Remember May '68

Upon the fortieth anniversary of the May '68 student protests in the streets of Paris, Patrice de Beer, former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde, explores France's politics of memory and finds the French caught between remembrance and forgetting.

An interesting point with particular resonance:

"Julie Coudry, the (possibly departing) president of the Confederation Etudiante, has made the point that in 1968, students (and striking workers) opposed to the ordre etabli sought new forms of participation and communication; while in 2008, people are fearful of all-powerful globalisation yet also anxious to play their part in the reform of an (again) blocked society where a new generation of young people (again) has little say."

Read the entire article here.

Earth Day Top Ten

It's Earth Day's 38th birthday...so get out there and celebrate, or at least consider doing one thing to benefit the environment on April 22. Here's Identity Theory's Top Ten things to do on Earth Day:

1. Shake Some Action. Find out what you can do in your own city, town or neighborhood. Visit Earth Day Network, EarthDay.gov or the EPA's web site to browse volunteer opportunities.

2. Start At Home. Somebody famous said, "the revolution starts at home" (I think). There are so many simple, energy-smart things you can do around the house. In addition to recycling, consider switching out the six bulbs you use the most to CFLs. Then, get these to show-off to all your friends.

3. Compare Notes. Energy policy will clearly be on the top of the deck for the next president of the United States. Find our where John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama stand now.

4. Make the Call. Got something to say to your representative or senator about climate change legislation or environmental policy? Get on the horn.

5. Travel More. Volunteer with Earthwatch Institute and travel alongside scientists and researchers to preserve coral reefs and save endangered species.

6. Go Back to School. A bunch of colleges and universities now offer "green" academic programs. University of Texas-Austin offers a masters degree in sustainable design and other school are following suite. Already working in the green sector? Get together for Green Drinks, an organization that schedules meet-ups.

7. Eat Up! Sprig.com lists seven foods you should add to your grocery list, from Stonyfield Yogurt to Carbon Neutral Wineries. These companies are carbon-offsetting so these foods don't contribute to climate change.

8. Make An Eco-Resolution. Use a green calculator to figure out how small changes in your everyday life could positively impact the environment. Then, pick one action and stick with it for the year.

9. Get in the Sack. Yes, there are a plethora of ways to green your sex life, and Treehugger has got an exhaustive list of what you can do between your bamboo bed sheets.

10. Look Beyond This List. For more ideas, check out the New York Times Magazine's Green Issue.

"A Pathetic Round of 'Gotcha' Questioning"

"For years now, I've grimaced when I see polls showing the persistent downward slope of public trust in the American news media. This Wednesday night, I could hardly blame that public."
-Jerry Lanson, Professor of Journalism-

Emerson College professor Jerry Lanson reacts to Wednesday night's presidential debate in "A Pathetic Round of 'Gotcha' Questioning," and wonders:

"Someone might just as well have asked: 'Senator, are you or were you ever a member of the Communist Party? A sympathizer, perhaps? Because the tenor of the questions at times seemed vaguely reminiscent of the '50s, the early '50s when Joseph McCarthy took his communist witch hunt from the State Department to Hollywood."

Meanwhile, FactCheck.org puts what both candidates said to the test. Read it all here.

Images from the Other Side

"Imagine if every week a televised roll call memorialized Iraq's civilian casualties with individual portraits. If this were possible, we would witness, in full, the staggering human costs of Iraq's occupation on a personal level. The politics of history dictate who is remembered and who is not, and most countries prefer to honor only their own dead. Perhaps, if we were confronted with those we've killed, face-by-face, we could better question the notion of 'us and them' and address the abstraction of death that skews our understanding of war."

Read more of Caroline E. Winter's Witness column at AdBusters. Winter takes as her point of departure the recent release of stills taken of Khmer Rouge victims at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison where an estimated 1.7 million people were tortured and killed between 1975 and 1979. The images, taken by Nhem Ein, are now housed at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide.

Perspectives on the Summer Olympics

Find out what the Dalai Lama and Tibet's Prime Minister in exile have to say about this year's Summer Olympics in China. Read the New York Times article "Dalai Lama Show Support for Games" and Good Magazine's "Remember Tibet?".

Truckers Put On The Brakes

"On April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take: inaction. Faced with $4-per-gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down, shut down and started honking. On the New Jersey Turnpike, a convoy of trucks stretching 'as far as the eye can see,' according to a turnpike spokesman, drove at a glacial 20 miles per hour."

Read more of Barbara Ehrenreich's "Truckers Hit the Brakes" at Common Dreams to find out why Ehrenreich calls the truck drivers' inaction a "shining example of defiance in the face of economic assault." You can also check out her blog.

Super Site About EPA's Superfund Program

Check out SuperFund365.org, a web site with daily updates about places where Americans live at risk to exposure to dangerous toxins, sites that Superfund, a "federal program that investigates and cleans up the most complex uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites in the country," according to the Environmental Protection Agency, was created to clean-up. The program ran out of money in 2003.

Starting on September 1, 2007, Superfund365 will visit one toxic site currently active in the Superfund program, a journey that started in New York City and will end in Hawaii.

Democracy Now! Celebrates MLK

Listen in to Democracy Now! for a special one-hour feature on Dr. King's life and legacy, forty years after his assassination.

The segment features Rev. Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Dr. Vincent Harding (who wrote King's major antiwar speech, "Beyond Vietnam"), Taylor Rogers, Charles Cabbage, Jerry Williams, Judge D'Army Bailey -- all friends, colleagues, and activists motivated by King. You will also hear King giving his major speech against the Vietnam War and his last public address given the night before his death.

Also check out Amy Goodman's column, "Where Do We Go From Here." An excerpt:

"King made an essential link between poverty at home and war-making abroad. The connection, sadly, is as relevant today as it was the last year of King's life. A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, '40 Years Later: The Unrealized American Dream,' lays out key elements of the inequality that African-Americans experience in the United States around education, employment and wealth accumulation."

Latest From Howard Zinn

Zinn's latest book, A People's History of American Empire, hit on April 1. According to TomDispatch.com, "It's a gem and...represents a surprise breakthrough into cartoon format. It's a rollicking graphic history, illustrated by cartoonist Mike Konopacki, that takes us from the Indian Wars to the Iraqi "frontier" (with some striking autobiographical asides from Zinn's own life)."

Check out TomDispatch.com for Zinn's essay, "Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire." An excerpt here:

The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project -- Democrats and Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it. President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used "her navy and her army... as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression." And Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The values you learned here...will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world."

For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes -- in the Middle East and in the Mississippi Delta.

Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense -- that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization -- begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?

Zoning Out

In college, I was fortunate to take a class with one of the foremost experts on public policy, Theodore Lowi. What I remember most about Lowi, and the class, is a chapter from his book, The End of Liberalism, that focused on redistricting, rebuilding and rezoning in American cities, namely Chicago, and the adverse affect it had on minority populations in those cities.

I was again reminded of Lowi upon reading a wonderful piece that Good just ran on the public housing project Cabrini-Green in Chicago. With the City of Chicago now looking to massively overhaul public housing, Good asks, "when you get rid of the slums, where do you put the people?"

It's a problem that's being faced in a not too dissimilar way in New York City. Rezoning approved by the Planning Commission will remake 125th Street in Harlem into a "regional business hub with office towers and more than 2,000 new units of market-rate condominiums."

As the New York Times explains, "Opponents say the plan would displace dozens of small businesses, does not offer enough moderate-income housing and does too little to protect the area's historic buildings." Fortunately, two young law students - Giselle Schuetz and Kathleen Meyers, both 24 - are challenging the rezoning armed with a 110-year-old law. (More coverage at VOTE: Voices of the Everyday People)

Lowi challenged us to look beneath the surface of public policies. It's good to know there are writers and students out there who are taking his lesson and using it.